[talk-au] OpenStreetMap in Government

[waldo000000 at gmail.com]

On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 9:37 PM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Sometimes people think that it's better to slice up information into
> lots of little "objective" facts, like (in the case of mountain bike
> trails), width, surface, grade, etc, rather than a "subjective" fact
> like trail rating. But in practice, it's impractical to collect that
> much information, and it's impractical to combine it back into a
> usable form for data consumers, so we lose twice.


The important point is that a subjective tag at least needs an objective
definition. See e.g. the pretty good definitions on
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Grade. The subjective tag
"tracktype=grade1", according to the definition "Paved track or heavily
compacted hardcore" could easily be replaced with the objective tags
"surface=paved" or "surface=compacted".

I would argue that entering objective facts (e.g. "surface=*" in the
previous example) is a much better option than subjective tagging. It
requires no more information than you already have, and is no less
practical for data consumers. It's actually more powerful, specific, clear,
verifiable (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Verifiability), and reduces
the dependency of mappers and consumers on the wiki to make sense of the
data.

Point is: if you insist on using subjective tags as a short-cut, please,
please at least ensure they have objective definitions in the wiki.
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